ChickenOverlord
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User ID: 218
ChickenOverlord
3mo ago
My mom was a special education teacher for many years, most of that time was with the moderate to severe kids. I worked as an aide in her class on several different occasions. The reality is that many mildly mentally disabled kids can be taught enough to be able to be mostly functional adults (though they'll likely need help on a somewhat regular basis) while the moderate to severe ones never will, and will require constant care and supervision for the rest of their lives.
Schooling does little to nothing for these kids, but the problem is that school's real purpose is to be a state subsidized daycare to enable women to leave the home and work. Even though I vehemently disagree with school being used this way, that's the reality. Without these programs these parents will have to (gasp!) take care of their kids instead of working two jobs!
ChickenOverlord
11mo ago
Trump is a liar. He lied about something to such a serious degree that twelve citizens were firmly convinced that he is guilty.
He (or one of his accountants) labeled a payment for an NDA as a legal expense. If that's somehow a felony then either the law making it such is terrible, or the jury instructions were terrible, or both. That's before you get into the time travel aspect of this (Trump's mislabeling of a payment made in 2017 was in furtherance of another alleged crime, that being unlawfully interfering in the 2016 presidential election).
ChickenOverlord
1yr ago
Steven Crowder has leaked portions of the Nashville shooter's "manifesto": https://nitter.cz/scrowder/status/1721545965402726734
I put manifesto in scare quotes because the leaked portions seem to more part of a "schizo mass shooting planning diary" as opposed to "schizo essay on motivations for the shooting." That said, the leaked pages do reveal some insight into the shooter's motivation. The biggest surprise to me is that it doesn't really mention being discriminated against for being trans. Instead it focuses on the shooter's perceived perpetrators being rich privileged white kids with daddy's money. Basically the lyrics to The Dead Kennedys's song Holiday in Cambodia if they were written by a mass shooter. Also semi-surprising to me is their repeated use of the word "faggot" as an insult. I wouldn't have been surprised to see this in a mtf trans shooter's diary, but it's a bit surprising to see from ftm trans. Maybe some sort of performative masculinity?
In any case, the documents appear to be genuine though they haven't been 100% confirmed. Currently there's a lot of hubbub over whether or not they were appropriate to leak in the first place, but I see very little questioning of their authenticity. What are your thoughts?
ChickenOverlord
1mo ago
it's trivially true that social contagion plays an astounding part, as well as fetishism and abuse, and autism
I don't have any hard numbers to give you here, but one of the strongest pieces of evidence for me personally about transness mot being an inherent part of who you are is the autism->hyper-sexualized autogynephilia pipeline. Specifically a certain field of technology that I have closely followed for about 30 years is the biggest source of evidence for this: video game emulator development. Emulator developers aren't inherently always destined to be trannies, but the more talented they are the more likely they are to be a tranny (and/or a furry and/or all sorts of paraphilias generally).
Name the lead devs of a successful emulator (i.e. high accuracy and/or amazing performance) and in 80% of cases I can find lurid details of their weird fetishes for you. Off the top of my head Byuu/Near (SNES amongst others), Endrift (GBA amongst others), and the guy who made MelonDS (can't be bothered to look him up) are all trannies. Basically everyone on the Dolphin (Gamecube/Wii emulator) team are notorious sexual deviants. One of the only devs of a successful emulator I can't find anything about is SourMesen (dev of Mesen, a great NES emulator). He seems smart enough to not get involved in personal drama on the internet at least.
And this goes beyond just emulation, the sortsof people who get hyper into low level coding/hardware/hacking stuff tend to be deviants too, emulator devs just seem to be one of the most purely distilled examples of this tendency.
My experience with these sorts of people has probably been the strongest blocker for me accepting the trans lobby's claims regarding the nature of transness, potentially even a stronger blocker than my religious beliefs. Their claims just don't match with a much more obvious connection to me: turbo-autism leading to sexual devisncy including AGP.
ChickenOverlord
3mo ago
In 1994, Ukraine, Russia, the UK and the US signed the Budapest Memorandum.
Important note that almost everyone who brings up the Budapest Memorandum always seems to forget (or even intentionally omit): it was never ratified by the US Senate. In the US, the constitution requires all treaties to be ratified by the senate. Without being ratified, any treaties are not legally binding and aren't good for much more than toilet paper.
This phenomenon also seems to happen in literally any discussion about the Paris Climate Accords.
ChickenOverlord
8mo ago
such as trying to pull out of NATO
He never did any such thing though. He said we should pull out if it's not restructured in such a way that other members don't start pulling their own weight instead of just leaving everything to the US. And he was absolutely right to do so, around that same time we had embarrassments from our allies like Germany only being able to field ~10 mission ready fighter jets and ZERO submarines:
https://www.dw.com/en/only-4-of-germanys-128-eurofighter-jets-combat-ready-report/a-43611873
Just some useful legal context to add to this:
In the 90's the Clinton administration cracked down on so-called "kitchen table" FFLs. A lot of gun enthusiasts became FFLs in the 80's because it allowed them to bypass a lot of the onerous gun control regulations that had been passed in previous decades, at the small small cost of a fee, record keeping requirements, and allowing the ATF to search your home without a warrant or prior notice. But hey at least you can own post-1986 machine guns!
The Clinton administration changed this by requiring that FFLs be "in the business" of manufacturing and/or selling firearms, eliminating the ability of these smaller gun enthusiasts to become FFLs. Even though my state can set clear limits for automobile sales to determine who needs a car dealer license, the ATF seemes unable to set clear limits/amounts for what determines whether or not someone is "in the business" of selling firearms.
They've intentionally left it vague for decades because it creates fear amongst gunowners who never know if the ATF might arbitrarily and capriciously decide to go after them for even a small number of sales. And in cases like OP's story where they seem to be intentionally flirting with that line it gives all the more power and justification to the ATF for overreach.
Source on the Clinton admin FFL changes:
Also for your consideration, my state's rules on who needs a car dealership license vs. the ATF's guidance on what counts as being "in the business" of selling firearms:
ChickenOverlord
1yr ago
I think it's a problem with period pieces in general. Robert Eggers's work (The Vvitch, The Northman) is one of the few examples I can think of where someone in mass media attempted to have the characters' concerns match what people of that period's actual concerns would have been. And while I'm not sure what Eggers's feelings about religion are, I can tell from his films that he actually gets religious people, something that makes him better than 99% of people in tv and film. The hardcore Puritans in The Vvitch and the norse pagans in The Northman make sense on their own terms, which actually makes them more relatable to me in a strange way even if I find several of the specifics of their beliefs repugnant.
ChickenOverlord
1yr ago
It's diet and exercise. You have to have both. Together.
You really don't, at least for weight loss. You can lose weight from diet alone by simply eating X fewer calories. You can't really lose weight from exercise alone unless you're exercising at pro athlete/olympian levels, exercise just doesn't really burn all that many calories.
ChickenOverlord
3mo ago
A reasonable compromise here would be giving people who’ve been here for a certain amount of time amnesty and a green card. Hard to support this
We tried that compromise in the 80's, and it didn't work then to stem the tide of illegal immigration it only encouraged it. Why would things be any different this time?
In fact, the alternative is sticking us in the nose
Then speak plainly (that's one of the rules around here) and say what this alternative is. I'm expecting your answer to be some variation on Marxism/Communism/hippie dippie "why can't we all just, like, share everything dude?!" nonsense but I'm not being sarcastic when I say I'd love to be wrong here.
ChickenOverlord
3mo ago
a side effect of this taken across a whole society is an extraordinarily vulgar* culture that produces little thought, little art, and can't handle critical perspectives
How do you square this with the phenomenon of "this artist expressed rightwing opinions, we have to disavow anything he ever made"?
ChickenOverlord
8mo ago
The most frustrating part for me personally with Ukraine is all of the Europeans who spent the last 20 years complaining about America being the world police immediately expected us to bear the brunt of financing and supplying Ukraine. I'd say "you can't have it both ways" but apparently they can just neglect their military funding for decades and we'll happily pick up the slack. Literally this meme in reality: https://i.redd.it/9fo82deg74p81.png
ChickenOverlord
5d ago
A way around this is to institute more competency tests, and make them rigorous. This will naturally raise the spectre of jim crow era literacy tests, but fuck it, if you cant recall basic facts like rules of the road, rules of gun safety, or what congress/the president actually do, you shoudlnt be able to shoot, drive, or vote.
Jim Crow needn't be brought up at all. The countless hoops that New York State has instituted just to be able to carry a pistol (despite being a "shall issue" state now thanks to the Supreme Court) makes it clear that such processes absolutely will be abused (and already are). If we could actually trust our elected officials not to be fuckwad tyrants I'd support measures like the ones you suggest, but until that day (i.e. likely never) I'll stick with near universal gun rights.
I grew up in the San Diego area, and recall environmentalists opposing transmission lines from new desert solar plants into the city because it threatened some desert tortoise's habitat. Environmentalists have been this way for decades, at least right wing environmentalists like Uncle Ted and the anarchoprimitivists are honest about their intentions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise_Powerlink
https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/public_lands/energy/sunrise_powerlink/index.html
Also for anyone wondering after reading the environmentalist article, given that I grew up less than a mile away from the edge of the Cleveland National "Forest," it ain't no forest.
ChickenOverlord
1yr ago
Congress has subpoena power and you can land a contempt charge for ignoring them.
ChickenOverlord
1yr ago
Because he came across state lines with a gun
He didn't, the gun literally never left Wisconsin. Why do people keep repeating this one? And ehy do they keep making a big deal over him "crossing state lines" when his job was in Kenosha and it was 30 minutes away from his home. It's like if someone from NYC shot someone in Jersey City, no one would make a big deal out of it. He actually lived closer to Kenosha than the 3 people he shot.
ChickenOverlord
2yr ago
"No utilitarian" is a pretty absolute claim. I don't know if the author of the "bike cuck" comic is utilitarian, but he makes a very utilitarian argument about bike theft that follows the same logic as Walterodim's:
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/314/087/c1a.jpg
ChickenOverlord
3mo ago
I mean a more expansive view of language as a series of context-dependent games
Conservatives don't do this due to a "remarkable lack of intellectual imagination", they don't do it due to highly accurate pattern recognition that people who view things this way love to destroy civilization and law and order.
This is everyone's reminder that George Orwell, writing in 1944 before we even finished defeating the Nazis, argued that there was no clear definition of the term fascist and that the term had been used so widely and to describe so many fundamentally different things that it had already lost any real meaning; https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc
In Zimmerman's case we have abundant evidence that his story was accurate. We have testimony from Trayvon's friend who was on the phone with him shortly before the encounter that Trayvon made it all the way home and decided to double back to attack Zimmerman. We have an eyewitness who saw the fight from a distance who saw (based on the colors of the clothing he saw etc.) Trayvon on top of Zimmerman, beating him. We have the reports of paramedics and medical examiners showing injuries to Zimmerman consistent with him being grounded and pounded, while the only injuries on Trayvon's body (apart from the obvious bullet to the chest) were to his knuckles.
It was pretty much an open and shut case, and were it not for public pressure (and protests by advocacy groups funded by and working directly with Eric Holder and other members of the Obama DoJ) it would have never gone to trial, and rightly so.
Edit: source on the DoJ's involvement https://theweek.com/articles/462236/did-justice-department-incite-2012-trayvon-martin-protests
ChickenOverlord
1yr ago
The GI bill also covers trade school, and trade school enrollment has gone up ~60% since 1999 (the US population has only increased by around 20% since then). Though I imagine a lot of people doing trade school don't feel the need to pay for it with the GI bill since they feel confident in their money making abilities after graduation. That and the increasing ease with which to get student loans etc.
ChickenOverlord
2yr ago
When SBF says he didn't realize they were leveraged due to accounting error, I believe him. It's not like you can just install the QuickBooks Enterprise Crypto Derivatives Exchange plugin. All of this stuff was bespoke, and in a hurry.
I'm not buying your explanation here, like at all. Yeah there's not really any crypto-specific accounting software out there, but several of the issues FTX had would have been found in under an hour by any random schlub who completed a double-entry accounting course on youtube or skillshare. Having $3 billion in customer funds go into the bank account of an entirely different company (that is also owned by SBF) and never actually get transferred to FTX's accounts is beyond amateur hour. The worst accountants in the world could notice an issue that big. It was almost certainly fraud, and if it wasn't it was reckless and criminal levels of negligence.
But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. ... If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.
1 Corinthians 15:13-14,19
Why bother calling it Christianity if you're going to hollow out the most fundamental claims of Christianity? It's just secular humanism wearing Christianity as a skinsuit. It doesn't provide a way to be forgiven of your sins, it doesn't even think sin is real! It doesn't provide for resurrection or life after death, it doesn't believe in life after death!
So long as we're coming up with skinsuit religions, I hereby propose Pigfucking Islam, I-Want-To-Achieve-The-Opposite-Of-Nirvana Buddhism, and Do-ALL-The-Harm Jainism.
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